Narco News

Narco News is an online newspaper that covers the "War on Drugs” and social movements throughout the Americas. Its articles are available in English and Spanish, with some translations in Italian, French, Portuguese, and German. Narco News is funded by the Fund for Authentic Journalism.

The founder and editor of Narco News is American journalist Al Giordano. The web magazine currently has correspondents in Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico, and other Latin American countries.

In 1996, Mexican newspaper Por Esto! began running reports that Roberto Hernández – at the time the president of Mexican bank Banamex – was trafficking cocaine on a property he owned near Cancún in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo. Por Esto!'s publisher, Mario Menéndez, was subsequently sued in Mexican court for libel. The court found that Menéndez had not libeled, a decision upheld in appeal. A third appeal was made and thrown out of court.

Narco News began publishing the same story in English from its website, allowing the story to reach a wider audience. This culminated in a publicity tour in New York, including a forum at Columbia University with both Giordano and Menéndez in attendance. Banamex then sued Narco News and Menéndez together, maintaining that because potentially libelous information in the news stories were repeated in New York, and that the operators of Narco News' web host were headquartered in New York (although the servers were in Maryland), New York therefore had jurisdiction over the matter.

Aside from the propriety of a foreign company filing a case in New York for libel against its president, the case also raised several questions over the rights of websites:

"If the National Bank of Mexico can sue a website published from Mexico, over stories investigated, reported and uploaded from Mexico, and sue that website in New York, that would set a dangerous precedent that chills free speech throughout the internet. If you say something that a large corporation doesn't like, not only can you be hauled into court in Mexico, but you can be hauled into court anywhere in the world."

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Wikipedia